Meshuggah: What makes the new album different?

Tomas Haake – drummer with Meshuggah – has recently revealed in an interview for Metal Hammer what makes the band’s new album titled The Violent Sleep Of Reason differ from the previous records. It was recorded by the band all live in the studio.

This is how Tomas Haake explains the reasons for making such a decision:

“If you put it all together using computers (…) you can start with drums and then just add layers of guitars and then bass and it all sounds perfect. Obzen and Koloss are great albums, but, to me, they are a little too perfect. It didn’t really capture what we sounded like honestly. But where we recorded live, you get to hear the push and pull, one person might be a little ahead and the other might be a little behind. If you kill that, you can kill the energy. So for us it was just about going back to those albums that inspired us when we were growing up (…) and all of those bands had that energy. The albums in the ’80s and early ’90s had the rawness that I’m talking about — that’s what we wanted to recapture.”